Super Handy Translation Bots for Google Talk

You can now use Google’s translation engine to translate text directly from chat window. Thanks to those translation bots released by Google Talk Team for their IM.

To translate text, you need to add the appropriate bot into your contact list. These bots are named using the two-letter language abbreviation as “[from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com”.

For instance, if I want to translate some text from English to Chinese, I’ll be adding en2zh@bot.talk.google.com to my contact. Similarly, there are 29 other translation bots: ar2en, bg2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fi2en, fr2de, fr2en, hi2en, hr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, uk2en, ur2en, zh2en.

Any text sent to these bots will be translated and sent back. Cool huh?

I’ve been using chat bots ever since I started using IRC, but I’ve never encountered a translation bot. Though I chat only using English, I can use these little bots from my mobile and make it a pocket translator for quick and dirty translations. Absolutely cool!